the power for tomorrow's electric car. the united states consumes more plastics every year than steel, copper, and alinum combined. some of the most dramatic applications of polymer research can be found in automobiles. it's not only automobiles that benefit from the revolution in plastics. commercial jet airplanes save millions of dollars per year in fuel costs by using polymers, and space exploration is increasingly dependent on synthetic polymers. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. we have ignition and liftoff, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. for some thoughts on the direction of polymer research in the 21st century, we went to howard simmons, head of research for the du pont corporation. many places where we use metals today, particularly in structural applications, these will be taken over by polymers in the future. some of the more exotic things are in the area of medicine, where big markets are forecast in, for example, prosthetics. right now, today, most artificial bones, joints, ligaments, even arteries are all made of sophisticated manmade polymers. i saw a recent market estimate saying

. ♪ i remember back in 1975 when my father- in-law first... and his family first come to the united states. we ask him to celebrate santa claus. and he felt really out of place. however, after 20 years now, 30 years now it become almost a new tradition to our family. something that has been great living here is that we have been much more aware of other cultures. and for instance, when time comes for winter, we know then we have to be part of kwanzaa we know we have to be part of hanukkah we know we have to be part of las posadas, part of christmas. so, you know, when you got to adopt that perspective about holidays that's what is rich, is enriching us as a family. the caption center wgbh educational foundation] funding for this program [with captioning] was provided by: additional funding is provided by: and: here, kitty, kitty! here, kitty, kitty, kitty! here, kitty, kty you'd think it would be easy to tell which kids had trouble with their eyesight. [ thud ] but that's not always the case. even though one in four children may have a vision problem, eye doctors tell us the symptom

, bolivia, china, greenland, peru, russia, and the united states. at the end of every expedition, the ice is rushed back to the cold room at ohio state university, where it is preserved in a frozen library, waiting to be deciphered. thompson: and we now have 7,000 meters of core we store at minus 30. and it turns out now that it's the only tropical archive of ice cores on earth. narrator: these cores are crucial links in the history of climate, connecting the polar regions to the tropics. by analyzing this archive and comparing it to other climate records, a global understanding of past climate is emerging. woman: what we want to do is get it back to the lab and start working on it as quickly as possible, because everybody's really curious to see what kind of information it has. as a matter of fact, as we're drilling this, we're often talking about what information this record might hold and how it might fit in with all the other records. it's another piece of a global puzzle, and we feel that every one of these pieces is critical. narrator: in the lab, lonnie's team analyzes the ice core

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